Free World

This picture is here just in case you don't
want to deal with my crazed rant.
At least you got to see a koala, right?
Clicking that link was worth it after all...

So we call ourselves the free world. We say that we are at the height of civilization, that we are the most advanced, the most successful, the most cultured. We are the emissaries of freedom. But who is really free, and what is freedom?

Is the man free whose country lives in debt to another? Are citizens free who are shackled by addictions and apathy--who can't go a day without coffee and caffeine, who can't go more than a few hours it seems without the Internet or their favorite TV shows? "They can, they can." I know. But they don't... Is a nation free whose poor starve and whose population is bound to the concrete mausoleums we call metropoli? Is the nation free when money takes precedence over moral, when who you know is more important than who you are? Are people really free when blinded by bias, when a person's skin color or religion is a justification for hatred, and can a people ever be free when they work so tirelessly to renounce the freedoms that their fathers purchased so long ago?  Are we truly free when money and social status are the currency of dreams rather than ingenuity and determination? Where is our liberty when shackled by the mind-forged manacles that we call beauty or the bonds that we call social refinement? How can a country be free when its rulers--its representatives--are slaves to corporations and conglomerates, when a man's conscience must take second stage to his political mobility and his approval rating? How can we trumpet democracy when the government has forgotten the people--when Ploutos and Oligos have crushed Demos beneath their heels?

I guess the problem that I have with writing stuff like this is that I still don't have any answers. All I have is my discontent--the feeling that things aren't as they should be, that maybe things aren't as they seem. I write, perhaps, only to stay afloat in the darkling sea that is this unintelligible world. In the end, though, maybe it doesn't really matter. People can pretty much do what they want. It's a free world, after all...

Give them Bread

His hands were rough and worn, his face made raw and red by wintry winds. A tattered coat hung limp over melancholy shoulders, and ragged spurts of icy breath materialized before his face and lingered momentarily in the air before fading into the white of winter. I barely understood him above the hissing of the winds when through cracked lips came a stuttered, "Do you have money for bread?" I peered at him, fixing my gaze on the black beads, huddled beneath a forlorn brow; though he stood but a few feet from me, his eyes were miles away-- a glimmer at the bottom of an eternal well. "Are we not all beggars?" I smiled wistfully to myself and nodded to the man, and we walked together into the nearby corner store.

Before Ukraine, I never understood what it meant to be poor. Sure, there had been times when money was tougher to come by, and I had certainly read about abject poverty, but there was never a day where there was no food in the pantry, no money to pay the electric bill. There was never a day when I had to pawn my dishes so that I could buy bread or when I stood alone and cold in a frigid gale, begging from the apathetic and hurried handful of people crazy enough to still be out on the streets. We just happened to be passing by, but that experience and hundreds of other similar ones have got me thinking a lot about the plight of the poor.